TJM (The Jade Monkey)

When the original WHQ BBS of Mist Classic, The Screaming Tomato, was taken down by its SysOp Nitnatsnoc on May 1 1997, we were in a sticky situation. Members could still find each other on other BBSes and via e-mail and IRC on the InterNet, but there was no obvious hub to our activity, and it wasn't clear where eg. applications and art submissions should be sent. Happily (this is almost tautological) Happyfish offered to helpfully bridge the gap, adapting their existing The Aquarium BBS into a new WHQ for Mist, if only we could figure out a name and theme for one. Cthulu flailed uselessly for a couple of weeks on a few dead ends ("Salopard!" "CANOPiC JARS") before Happyfish proposed The Jade Monkey, a Simpsons deep-cut reference that also fulfilled the important artscene BBS criteria of having an obvious mascot and colour scheme as well as a three-word name that can helpfully be boiled down to a dashing three-letter acronym. Nice work! Despite these factors playing in our favour, the BBS did not attract a great deal of celebratory artwork from outside the Mist (and later Hallucigenia) crew, as the BBS-promotion side of the artscene was already winding up in 1997 and Cthulu and Happyfish didn't put a lot of energy into securing affils and art trades for it. (Internally, we yielded more art than we could use, so getting still more of it cooked up didn't seem to be terribly high priority.) As Mist WHQ, TJM did wind up acting as a critical hub in our KiTSCHNet echomail network, as well as being hooked up to [TABNet], Hallucigenia's CiLNet, and [CCiNet].

Our WHQ changeover coincided with the end of the Mistigris World Tour, so initial promotional mention of TJM was already taking place in the DARK0597 artpack released later that month. It operated at 604-730-2467 (a phone number that definitely hasn't hosted any bulletin boards this century, which you would therefore surely never call with a modem today) through until November of 1998, when Happyfish skipped town to serve a tour in the Katimavik program. Mist Classic had already fallen into torpor at that point, but TJM's imminent disconnection resulted in [DODEL] being revived to serve as the Hallucigenia WHQ.